The crisp air of summer early morning, so fragrant, so invigorating, eddied across the plains, wafting new life to the lungs, and increased vigor to jaded muscles. The sun was lifting above the horizon, bringing with it that expansion to the mind which only those whose lives are passed in the open, and whose waking hours are such as Nature intended, may know.
The rustling grass, long, lean at the waving tops, but rich and succulent in its undergrowth, spoke of awakening life, obeying that law which man, in his superiority, sets aside to suit his own artificial pleasures. The sparkling morning haze shrouding the foot-hills was lifting, yielding a vision of natural beauty unsurpassed at any other time of the day. The earth was good––it was clean, wholesome, purified by the long restful hours of night, and ready to yield, as ever, those benefits to animal life which Nature so generously showers upon an ungrateful world.
Peter Blunt straightened up from his camp-fire which he had just set going. He stretched his great frame and drank in the nectar of the air in deep gulps. The impish figure of Elia sat on a box to windward of the fire, watching his companion with calm eyes. He was enjoying himself as he had rarely ever enjoyed himself. He was 136 free from the trammels of his sister’s loving, guiding hand––trammels which were ever irksome to him, and which, somewhere inside him, he despised as a bondage to which his sex had no right to submit. He was with his friend Peter, helping him in his never-ending quest for gold. Hunting for gold. It sounded good in the boy’s ears. Gold. Everybody dreamed of gold; everybody sought it––even his sister. But this––this was a new life.
There were Peter’s tools, there was their camp, there was the work in process. There was his own little A tent, which Peter insisted that he should sleep in, while, for himself, he required only the starry sky as a roofing, and good thick blankets, to prevent the heat going out of his body while he slept. Yes; the boy was happy in his own curious way. He was living on “sow-belly” and “hardtack,” and extras in the way of “canned truck,” and none of the good things which his sister had ever made for him had tasted half so sweet as the rough cooking of this wholesome food by Peter. Something like happiness was his just now; but he regretted that it could only last until his sister returned to Barnriff. The boy’s interest in the coming day’s work now inspired his words.
“We go on with this sinking?” he inquired; and there was a boyish pride in the use of the plural.
Peter nodded. His eyes were watching the fire, to see that it played no trick on him.
“Yep, laddie,” he said, in his kindly way. “We’ve got a bully prospect here. We’ll see it through after we’ve had breakfast. Sleepy?”
Elia returned him an unsmiling negative. Smiling was 137 apparently unnatural to him. The lack of it and the lack of expression in his eyes, except when stirred by terror, showed something of the warp of his mind.
“You aren’t damp, or––or anything? There’s a heap of dew around.” The man was throwing strips of “sow-belly” into the pan, and the coffee water was already set upon the flaming wood.
“You needn’t to worry ’bout them things for me, Peter,” Elia declared peevishly. “Wimmin folks are like that, an’ it sure makes me sick.”